


Four Fathers

by atamascolily



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Father Figures, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Languages and Linguistics, Mentor/Protégé, Skywalker Family Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 14:31:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15172727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: Some people have one father in their lifetime. Luke Skywalker has four. All of them die before his journey is complete.





	1. Owen

There's a word in High Alderaani, Leia says, for a man who acts as your father, whether they're related to you by blood or not. Like most words for family in that language, it doesn't translate well in Basic. It's what she calls Bail Organa; she's always known that he was family and nothing else matters. She translates it as "father," when she speaks of him, but that's not quite right, as Luke later learns from Threepio. _Uncle_ gets the right idea, though of course, it doesn't come close to capturing the nuances and intimacy of the relationship. 

Later, as Luke pieces his complicated family history together, he realizes it doesn't matter whether Uncle Owen was Anakin's biological brother or not. For better or worse, Owen is the man who raised Luke, the father who's shaped him to be who he is, far more than Anakin ever did. The same word Leia uses for Bail Organa applies equally well to Owen Lars. 

After all, Owen is the one who taught him to fix a motor, drive a speeder, how to haggle with a Jawa trader without getting ripped off, and that honesty and hard work are two skills that will serve him well all his life. Owen is the one who valued precision and exactitude, who refused to settle for anything less than Luke's best, even when Luke would have preferred to slip away to Tosche Station to socialize with his friends. Luke may have inherited Anakin's hotshot reflexes and drive for the stars, but Owen is to the one who taught him to fly and gave him wings. 

There are things Owen is not skilled at that Luke must learn elsewhere. How to express emotions, for instance; how to communicate those feelings clearly to others. There are times in his childhood where Luke wonders if his uncle loves him because there are no obvious signs of affection - compliments are few and far between and Luke works so hard to meet his exacting standards without much to show for it. It isn't until much later that Luke realizes there are different ways of showing love, and that Owen gave him the best that he knew how. 

When Owen is alive, Luke uses the word _uncle_ to distance himself from the gruff, hard man laboring away in the desert sands beside him. _You're not my father,_ hums the implicit dynamic between them, _and I don't have to listen to what you say. My REAL father wouldn't be like this._

It is cruel and he knows it even at the time, but he has no other weapons in his arsenal against the deep, abiding fear that he will never achieve the great deeds he yearns for. It is his revenge against Owen, who anchors him to to the farm--barely solvent even in the best of years--and keeps him at home, where he is simultaneously safe and stagnant. 

Later, of course, when Luke learns more of his heritage, it becomes abundantly clear why Owen hesitates when Luke dreams of the Imperial Academy, why Luke's talk of piloting engenders such implacable grimness. 

Owen is right to fear the Empire. In the end, it's what kills him, for no better reason than his family haplessly stumbled into a rebel plot by purchasing two talkative, unruly droids from the desert traders. 

Owen's death is a lesson, one that Luke never forgets, about the fundamental unfairness of life and war. _Everything you love, everything you know, can be taken from you in an instant. There is no going back from that moment._

(Leia learns the same lesson with Bail's death, too. Even before they know the truth of their shared heritage, their lives parallel each other, coincidences piled atop coincidences, an easy and comfortable rapport between them.)

"Forgive me," Luke whispers when he returns to Tatooine to stand in the ruins of his former life by Owen's grave, which he dug himself to hold the smoking corpse he found after the forces of the Empire had come and gone. "Thank you. And farewell." 

He wishes he'd said those words to them before Owen died and not after, but there are some things in life you don't get to choose, and this is one of them. 

He hopes, somehow, that Owen can hear him, wherever he is. Of all his fathers, Owen is the only one who never comes back from beyond the brink of death to visit him.


	2. Ben

High Alderaani is a complex language, Luke discovers. Not only are there vast numbers of kinship terms, there are entire grammatical tenses and modes that require the speaker to define their relationships with precision if they wish to be properly understood. Growing up in isolation in the desert, it's dizzying for Luke to imagine the concepts that such words imply: cousin-by-blood, cousin-by-marriage, adopted-sibling-you-could-also-marry, adopted-sibling-you-can't. Dizzying to imagine a family network so big and so vast, it encompasses an entire planet. The first order of business when any two Alderaani meet is to figure out how they're related to each other--only then can the conversation proceed if you want to speak High Alderaani together. 

Luke is not surprised to learn there is a word to describe his relationship with Ben Kenobi--the father-figure you know only briefly, but who completely transforms your life. 

(Han says to him once, in a moment of rare openness, "That's the only kind of father I ever had.") 

For most of Luke's life, Ben exists on the fringes of his awareness. He's the crazy wizard, the old man who lives on the edge of the Jundland Wastes alone, harmless enough, but more than a little creepy if you meet him alone. "Stay away from him," Owen warns, and Luke does, but he can't help but wonder why the lone figure silhouetted against the double suns inspires so much ire. There's a story there, he senses, some old wound that's never healed, and he doesn't know how to ask without stirring up even more pain. Ben never tries to speak to him, and Luke never tries to engage him; it's easier that way for everyone. 

That said, sometimes while running errands in Anchorhead, Luke catches Ben watching him, and it unsettles and intrigues him, and he doesn't know why. 

The day Ben makes a dramatic entrance into Luke's life begins like any other on the farm--except for the fact that the new R2 unit has run off and Luke has to find him before his uncle notices anything is awry. He's out at first dawn in his landspeeder, heading east towards the Jundland Wastes, cursing the slip of attention that caused him to remove the droid's restraining bolt in the first place. He thinks about the mysterious message the astromech showed him, the hologram of that beautiful woman dressed in white, begging Obi-wan Kenobi for help. This R2 unit went looking for Obi-wan, who is somehow related to Ben, and Luke is torn between exploring the mystery further and getting back home to finish his chores. 

Of course, nothing goes according to plan. He finds the R2 unit, only to be attacked by Sand People and knocked unconscious. He wakes sprawled out on the canyon floor, a brown-robed old man kneeling at his side, watching him intently. Luke recognizes him instantly, though they've never spoken. 

"Ben? Ben Kenobi? Boy, am I glad to see you!" 

Everything happens so fast after that. Ben whisks Luke away to his desert hut, where they eat and drink and Ben shares stories of Anakin Skywalker--the secret, forbidden tales that Owen and Beru have hidden from him. Luke's eyes grow wide, but secretly he's delighted-- he knows Anakin was bigger than his guardians have ever let on. 

Ben wants him to be a part of greatness, to join the Rebellion. To come with him to Alderaan and strike a blow against the Empire. To meet that beautiful woman who's haunted his dreams ever since he saw her holo the night before. Everything Luke has ever wanted, all in one simple request: "Come with me." 

And Luke accepts. Not at first, but when he stumbles back to the farm later that afternoon, weeping and sobbing as he catches a glimpse of the smoke rising from his home, as hope evaporates, he knows he can't go back to that sheltered life he's led up until today, that he can only go forward into the unknown. He accepts Ben's invitation, turned bittersweet by his losses. He accepts Ben's company and Ben's teaching and Ben as his surrogate father, to replace the one he lost that very day as well as the one he's never known. 

Three days. That's all they have together, at least with both of them alive. Three days, and it's not enough, will never be enough time, but it's enough to completely transform Luke's life and nothing will ever be the same again. 

Ben looks harmless enough on the surface, but Luke quickly discovers that the desert hermit has hidden depths. With a wave of his hand, Ben can persuade Imperial stormtroopers to let them pass a checkpoint, using the mysterious power of the Force to cloud and confuse their minds so that they cannot see what is directly in front of them. In that dim, smoky cantina in Mos Eisley, Ben cajoles a drunk spacer looking for an easy fight with Luke, urging peace and reconciliation in the form of shared drinks, but when the blasters come out, he slices a man's arm off with a glowing laser sword rather than watch Luke get hurt. So when Ben fires up a remote and urges Luke to block the blasts with his own laser sword, Luke knows--though he doesn't understand _how_ \--this is something that Ben can do, too, though Luke never gets a chance to see Ben in action. 

It's over so fast. One moment, he's running with Han, Chewie and the princess towards the welcoming shelter of the _Millennium Falcon_ , the next he's staring in horror at the sight of Ben locked in combat with a dark, armored figure, tall and imposing, radiating horror and death and destruction in all directions, so thick and terrible Luke can _feel_ it dozens of meters away. Ben's face is calm, impassive, showing none of the fear he must surely feel, or perhaps he is beyond all fear. He pauses for a moment, as Luke cries out, looks over across the docking bay to Luke--

\--and smiles at him, meeting his gaze for one long, heart-stopping moment, before turning to face that armored figure and drop his guard--

Luke watches Ben die. One moment he's there, the next moment, the red lightsaber swishes through the space where Ben's body was, and he is gone, vanished into his mysterious Force. For the second time in forty-eight hours, Luke is orphaned, but there isn't time to grieve until much, much later. 

Though it turns out that death can't keep Ben down. Even as Luke screams and rushes forward towards that non-existent body, blaster firing wildly, he hears Ben's voice in his mind, urging him to run to safety. In the cockpit of his X-wing, racing down the trench to that thermal exhaust port on the Death Star, Ben speaks to him again, urging him to turn off his targeting computer and use the Force to save the galaxy. Luke doesn't think, doesn't reason, there's no time for any of that; he just obeys the ghostly voice and fires the shot unaided. It works, it works, and suddenly he's a hero and a murderer all in one--depending, as Ben might put it, on your point of view. 

But that's later. At first, everything with Ben is easy, even after Ben is gone. His name gets Luke's foot in the door with Alliance High Command, even as his talent and courage and rapport with Leia get him the rest of the way. Ben is his inspiration, his idol, his mentor, his reminder that wonders are possible, and that Luke is destined for far greater things than a mere Commander of a starfighter unit in the Rebellion. 

So when Ben's ghostly figure appears to him in a snowstorm on Hoth, urging him to depart for his Jedi training with Yoda, Luke doesn't question why or how. He goes. It is his destiny. He trusts Ben completely. After all, why shouldn't he? 

Their relationship get more complicated after that. Ben gets him in with Yoda, which is good, but then Ben sides with Yoda when Luke leaves to rescue Han and Leia, which doesn't feel good at all. Then Vader reveals that Ben lied to him about his father, and things get worse. 

That knowledge--that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he recalls his time with Ben--gets tangled up with the ache of his missing hand, and everything jumbles together in a blur of pain and recrimination at Ben and at himself. "Why didn't you tell me?" he whispers over and over again, but Ben's ghost never answers him. The silence aches all the more because he knows Ben could respond, but chooses not to. 

By the time he sees Ben again, everything has changed. The easy comaraderie between them has vanished, replaced by caution and suspicion and echoes of old failures. Ben is full of sophistry, yes, clever arguments for why he took the path he did, and yet he is also a contradictory mass of truths and opinions, shattering Luke's life still further with further revelations of family and kinship. In the same breath, Ben confirms that Leia is Luke's sister, and urges Luke to kill his own father.

Ben insists that Vader has to die, that he is irredeemable but Luke knows even as Ben speaks that his mentor is wrong. Contradicting him is one of the hardest things Luke has ever done--the profound disappointment on Ben's face shakes him to his core--yet he knows in his heart that he is right and clings to that knowledge when his courage fails. 

Luke knows exactly why Ben lied about his father's fate. If Luke had known at nineteen that some form of Anakin Skywalker was alive, he would have run straight to him, and he would have been consumed utterly. Ben's lies saved his life, kept him safe until he was ready--or more ready, at least--to learn the truth. That doesn't make forgiveness any easier, though. 

But Luke forgives him in the end--not because he has to, but because he understands. He understands why Ben couldn't strike down Darth Vader in cold blood twenty years earlier, why he considered Vader's death was a necessary evil, why he let Vader cut him down as penance. He _understands_. And in that shining moment after the battle of Endor where he sees Ben's ghost standing next to Anakin's, he knows that Ben understands, too, and all is healed between them. 

As a sign of his forgiveness, Luke names his only son Ben. It's his way to honor the complicated, contradictory man who set him on the course to becoming a Jedi. The man who had no children of the body, and yet was Luke's father, just as much as any of the others who might lay claim to that title. 

In High Alderaani, at least, there is no contradiction.


	3. Yoda

If Ben is the mentor who flashes into Luke's life like a supernova before abruptly fading, Yoda is the pole-star that shines with its own pulsing, internal light, constant and steady on the horizon before fading with the dawn. Ben is the one who tells him stories of the Jedi, but it's Yoda who teaches him what it means to _be_ one. 

Training with Ben is more like play than work--sparring with remotes, listening to intuitions, trusting his feelings. Time with Ben is _liberation_ , full of freedom and adventure and excitement.

From his time with Ben, Luke thinks he knows what Jedi training is like. One day in the swamp with Yoda is enough to shatter all of those illusions. 

Training with Yoda is _hard_. Training with Yoda means waking up before dawn every morning, to sit cross-legged facing the wall for an hour in meditation. Training with Yoda means endless runs through the swamp, balancing on his hands for hours, twisting in impossible contortions while lifting rocks with his mind. He never even touches his lightsaber. Training with Yoda means being perpetually sweaty and soaked and tired, and the food is terrible, so he doesn't eat much. Smoke from Yoda's little fire is always stinging his eyes and there are snakes everywhere. He smacks his head on the ceiling of Yoda's hut, and sleeps curled up in the corner on the rough and bumpy floor under a coarse blanket.

Yoda is nothing like Luke imagined. He is clever, stubborn, and possibly crazy, but with a distinctive method that underlies any pretensions to madness. He amuses himself by teasing Artoo, and cows the astromech droid into submission, a feat Luke had never thought possible. Yoda laughs at jokes that aren't funny and expects Luke to carry him around the swamp on their travels. Yoda is no warrior (great or otherwise), and doesn't think it matters. Yoda is constantly destroying Luke's composure and turning everything he knows upside down. Yoda asks questions that are simple enough on the surface, but have hidden depths, and come back to haunt him later.

Luke is surly and resentful, swirling with anger and impatience, but Yoda never bats an eye at his complaints. Yoda is not impressed with Luke's temper, his excuses or his hesitations; Yoda is nine hundred years old and has seen it all. Luke envies him his serenity, even as it frustrates him. It's not until decades later, when Luke is training students of his own, that he realizes how patient and understanding Yoda truly is with him, and what a gift the old Jedi has for imparting instruction. 

Part of the reason he's so angry, Luke realizes later, is _because_ Yoda is never impressed with anything he does. It's like working with Owen all over again, except that Luke never wanted to be a moisture farmer the way he wants to be a Jedi. Luke's no stranger to hard work, Owen's seen to that, but none of his accomplishments can satisfy Yoda. Yoda doesn't seem _interested_ in Luke's progress, or if he is, it's not by any metrics Luke can understand at the time.

Right when Luke is about to explode, Yoda lifts a spaceship out the swamp without twitching a finger--a ship Luke can't lift no matter what he does. Luke is humbled enough to admit that maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about everything and Yoda has it right. Maybe, just maybe, his little alien teacher knows exactly what he's about, and Luke should shut up and listen. 

Things get better after that. Luke stops fighting and begins to apply himself. As he abandons his ideas of the possible, and opens himself more fully to the Force, he grows in leaps and bounds. Yoda's disappointed murmurs transform to toothy half-smiles and chuckles, and Luke begins to think that maybe he can do this Jedi business after all. 

And then Luke has visions of Han and Leia writhing in agony, and everything goes straight to hell. 

He has to go. He has to go, or else he'll never be able to live with himself, and Yoda doesn't want him to go. Yoda doesn't _understand_ , Luke thinks, although later he realizes that Yoda understands all too well what it's like to watch your friends suffer and die, unable to save them. Yoda tells him it's too dangerous, which is true, that Luke is stubborn and reckless (also true) and that his decision to confront Vader places the entire galaxy in peril. In his heart, Luke knows Yoda is right, but it doesn't matter--Luke has to go, or else he'll lose everything worth fighting for, everything that gives his life meaning. The Force alone is not enough. 

It breaks Yoda's heart, and Luke knows it. Luke doesn't realize how much he loves the wizened old Jedi, how much he cares, until he's walking away, and turns back just in time to see that look in Yoda's eyes, but it's too late to stop. Yoda could stop him in a heartbeat if he wanted to, just yank the X-wing out of the sky, but Yoda doesn't, because he respects Luke's right to decide his fate for himself, even if it dooms them all. It's a freedom Luke doesn't appreciate when he's clinging one-handed to an airshaft in the Bespin twilight, sobbing from the pain that rips through his heart and his body, but he never blames Yoda for anything; everything that happened to him, he brought squarely on himself.

Luke promises to return to complete his training. Though Yoda may not believe him, Luke clings to that promise as a talisman to get him through the ordeals he must face at Bespin and beyond. Even at the height of his darkest hours, he knows he has to survive so he can keep his word to Yoda. His friends are important, but so is Yoda, and he will do everything in how power to satisfy his obligations to both parties. 

Yoda never lies to him about who he is or what he must do. (Lying is Ben's job.) Yoda waits patiently for Luke to return, even as he wastes away to nothing, wracked with the final illness that will ultimately kill him. Yoda's last, greatest gift is to hang on long enough for Luke to say good-bye, to forgive Luke for his failings, and to acknowledge his progress, to legitimize him as a Jedi. In his final moments, Yoda shows him the peace of accepting one's fate, and letting go to become one with the Force at last.

Yoda is not afraid of death, and because of that, Luke isn't, either. After Yoda passes, Luke can walk straight into the heart of darkness, confront Vader and the Emperor on the Death Star, because he knows that death is the beginning of another journey, not its end. He, too, will be one with the Force when his time arrives, and there is nothing to fear in this. 

Without that courage borne of certainty, he might not have made it through. Or perhaps another path would have opened. As Yoda says, "Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future". And yet Luke has no doubt that without Yoda's teachings, that solid bedrock ground into his mind and body from endless hours of repetition, he would have fallen and failed at Endor, and there would be no peace in the galaxy at last. 

Yoda is the father Luke desperately needed in his life, the one who offers him the lessons he most needed to learn--never easy, but always fair and just and right, even when they hurt like hell. Luke is Yoda's last, best student, his hope and gift to the future--and, in some intangible way, just as much his father as anyone else who lays claim to the role. 

Luke would have it no other way.


	4. Anakin

For most of his life, Luke is obsessed with Anakin Skywalker, the father-of-his-body whose absence shaped his life far more thoroughly than any mere mortal could achieve with his presence. Anakin's absence leaves a vacuum that Luke rushes to fill with dreams and fantasies. Lacking family holos, he imagines his father as a hot shot pilot with flashing eyes and roguish laugh, handsome and clever and kind like the hero in the tales. The scraps of Anakin's biography take on a mythic quality, as Luke envisions the one who got away from Tatooine's gravitational pull to fly among the stars as a pilot on a spice freighter, only to die from his own recklessness in an accident in deep space. It's a tragedy that Luke continually mourns because it means they will never meet and the story is ended prematurely. It doesn't seem fair, Luke thinks, but then, as Owen frequently points out, life isn't fair, and you make the best of what you're given, even when it pains you. 

For most of Luke's life, Anakin is a mystery, a cipher, and a ghost, a warning about what happens when you reach beyond your station in life. Better to keep your head down in the realm of the tangible and the real, better to sweat and labor for scraps and water and keep your family safe instead of haring after adventures and glory. That craving for more, Anakin's story suggests, is what gets you killed. Not being satisfied with what you have is a curse that brings down death and destruction on you and the ones you love. 

Later, Luke realizes that conclusion isn't far off from the truth--from a certain point of view, at least. But in the beginning, when everything is simple and easy and innocent (or at least appears that way in hind sight), Anakin Skywalker is Luke's idol, his hero, the model for the man he hopes to become, and he dismisses his uncle's doubts as fear and cowardice. Or so Luke tells himself at night when the desert winds blow and he can't get the sandy grit out of his mouth and clothes, and he wants nothing more than to escape. _If my father can do it, then I will, too,_ is his mantra. For better or worse, Anakin Skywalker is the figure onto which Luke projects his dreams, because dreams are fragile in the great salt flats and the Dune Sea, and the desert eats them. Without those dreams to keep him going, Luke's afraid he'll dry up and die, too. 

Anakin's story is protean and muteable, shifting and expanding as Luke begins to pull more pieces together. From Ben's stories, Luke envisions Anakin as a hero of the Clone Wars, a valiant fighter and one of the fabled Jedi, roaming the galaxy and righting wrongs, his lightsaber clipped proudly to his belt. His father was lost, yes, but it was at the hands of a treacherous comrade, a betrayal of all he held dear, not an accident of fate or his own carelessness. Anakin Skywalker is someone that Luke can be proud of--and has every _right_ to be proud of. He will become a Jedi, not only because it is good and true and right for him to be one, and he has a gift for it--but because his father was a Jedi, and all Luke has ever wanted is to be like his father. 

(Becoming like his father is the next best thing to meeting him in this life, Luke thinks at one point, wincing in hindsight at the irony.) 

From that day forward, Luke wears his father's lightsaber on his belt with pride, even though he's not entirely certain what it does or how to use it. It's his good-luck talisman, tangible proof of his heritage and his destiny. It saves his life more than once. 

He loses that lightsaber, along with his right hand and his innocence, when Vader shatters these illusions. In one swift stroke, the story changes yet again, into something darker and more terrible. Obi-wan lied; Vader isn't his father's murderer after all. 

Vader _is_ his father. 

Luke realizes later that's not quite right: Vader was once Anakin Skywalker and could be Anakin Skywalker again, but he isn't Anakin Skywalker himself, not really. That's the only way Luke can justify it to himself, the only way he can think of to resolve that impossible paradox. Anakin Skywalker is still good, still human, still mortal--Vader is the darkness, the enemy, the shadow, the one who swallowed Anakin whole and consumed him with his anger and hatred and jealousy. Vader is the one who tortured Luke's friends, who held Leia down as her planet was destroyed, who murdered his former teacher while Luke stared in horror. Vader is the epitome of Imperial brutality, the one man who represents everything Luke has ever fought against, and now everything is so--

\-- _personal_. 

The ache of his missing hand fades with time. The pain in his heart lingers. Shattered ideals are harder to heal than flesh, and no prosthetic exists for dreams. 

At first, he thinks it for a lie, a cruel and effective weapon to demoralize Luke and break his spirit. But blood calls to blood--he _recognizes_ Vader on some deep, primal level--and once he's seen their connection, there's no denying it, though he does everything he can to persuade himself otherwise. 

Luke knows that the same darkness that consumed Anakin exists inside himself. He saw that in the cave on Dagobah, even if he didn't understand the meaning of his vision at the time. Perhaps he inherited that from his father, like his gift for the Force and his lightsaber, or perhaps it's human nature. It doesn't matter. Like his father, Luke is tainted; if he wavers, he will suffer Anakin's fate. 

The irony is cruel. All his life, he's strived to mirror Anakin--to match him--only to discover that following in Anakin's footsteps is the one thing he musn't do. 

But Luke refuses to give up on his dream. Ben's ghost insists it is impossible and Yoda is skeptical. Even Leia doesn't understand why he must go alone into danger to save his father from himself. They didn't see those years of striving against the desert, those impossible fantasies of family and connection. They didn't understand that that dream has made him the man he is, and he can no more abandon it than he could abandon Han and Leia to torture and death at Vader's hands. 

All his life, he's wanted to meet his father. Though his father has been resurrected as a monster, Luke yearns to look underneath the mask, to discover the man beneath. They're not so different. Seen one way, the same flaws that pulled Anakin under might swallow Luke, too--from another perspective, there is an echo of Luke's incorrigible spirit in Anakin that can save them both. 

The only way to know for certain is to meet face to face and surrender completely. 

His plan is dangerous and chancy, and it very nearly fails. The Emperor is canny and shrewd, and he knows how to get under Luke's skin to torment him; Vader is even more astute in that regard. Luke's temper flares and he fights, even after he swore he wouldn't, when the strain and agony is more than he can bear. Only after his father is pleading and gasping at his feet, one metallic hand smoking and sputtering at the wrist, does Luke realize that history has repeated itself, and he is reminded, yet again, that he and Vader are more alike than they are different. 

_Mercy. Mercy. Mercy._

_There but for a quirk of fate go I._

So Luke tosses his lightsaber aside. He refuses to fight, refuses to kill, refuses the revenge that is rightfully his, refuses the death Vader so richly deserves. He turns and faces his true enemy, the Emperor, alone and unarmed and completely at his mercy. 

"I am a Jedi, like my father before me," he says. And it is true. It is the culmination of his entire life, his hopes, his fears, his dreams, his training--everything he is and was and could be, encapsulated in a single, shining moment. In that moment, he does the one thing that Anakin could not do--perhaps because Anakin never had a father, not even a dream of him, and Luke did. 

And somewhere, deep down, buried deep in that core of dark machinery and rage, Anakin Skywalker hears his son's voice and emerges after a quarter century in exile to save him. 

Luke doesn't know, at first, that his father has awakened. All he can feel is the pain. Then the pain is gone, and his father is there, the father he's been missing all his life, and they are together at last, hovering on the edge of the abyss and the edge of death while everything falls apart around them. There are no words to express their love for each other, and they do not need them. 

Luke doesn't remember how he finds the strength to haul his father down the corridors towards the docking bay, while alarms hoot and explosions rumble in the distance as the Rebel attack continues and Imperial troops scatter in dismay. Nobody pays any attention to the battle-scarred man dressed in black as he half-drags, half-carries Vader's heavy armor with him to safety. He does what he came here to do, because he has no other choice. He came here to save his father and they are not out of danger yet. 

Anakin, however, doesn't see it that way. When Luke collapses on the gangplank of the shuttle, Anakin begs him to stop, to remove the mask and let him die in peace, unaugmented, whole and free for the first time in decades. Luke obeys, and looks his father in the eye at last--only to lose him a few moments later as Anakin dies in his arms.

In the days after the Battle of Endor, only Leia understands why Luke grieves. Even then, she cannot share it with him, only hide her relief that the monster who haunted her nightmares is gone forever while Luke is safe. Leia never calls Vader 'father' by any term but the strictly clinical one; he may have engendered her, but she is not bound to him by any ties of love or kinship recognized by the Alderaani society he butchered. She understands why Luke acts as he does, but she does not feel that pain herself, and he respects that. 

He does not share this story with anyone else. No one else would understand why Luke carried his father's armor into the shuttle with him; no one else would understand why he burned that armor standing alone in a forest clearing on Endor while fireworks exploded in the sky above him and the celebrations continued until dawn. No one else sees the ghostly figure of Anakin Skywalker--healed and whole, as he never was in life--standing on the edges of the Ewok village that night, smiling proudly at his son. 

Luke receives many honors and recognitions in his life, many praises and celebrations for his deeds over the course of a long and eventful lifetime. Yet nothing-- _nothing_ \-- will ever replace his joy in that moment, as something lost and aching heals inside him and the greatest wish of his life is granted. 

Luke Skywalker is a Jedi like his father before him. His father loves him dearly and is proud of him. And they are both free.


End file.
